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git commit doesn’t commit? (GitPython bug)

Mostly posting this to remind myself of the fix the next time I run into this but htis might help some other people as well.

Every once in a while I’ll be working on a git repo in the fedora packages repository and when I git commit -a it, I’ll end up with an empty commit and the files with changes aren’t actually committed. Other intuitive variations of this like git add FILE && git commit have the same buggy behaviour.

The reason this is occurring has something to do with the GitPython library which is used by fedpkg to add some changes to your clone of the git repo when you add new source files. It’s somehow changing the index in a way that causes this behaviour. To get out of this there’s a few simple but non-intuitive things you can try:

git reset FILE && git add FILE
git stash && git stash pop

After running one of those pairs of commands you should once more be able to git commit -a.